spago

There's plenty of interesting activity going on: The Discourse ( https://discourse.purescript.org/ ) and Slack channels ( https://fpchat-invite.herokuapp.com/ ) are active (and quite welcoming / helpful). A community fork of "PureScript by Example" is being updated / maintained, here: https://book.purescript.org/ Try PureScript is back online after a hiatus: https://try.purescript.org/ The compiler is now at version 0.13.8 with reasonably regular updates (and 0.14.0 should be on the way reasonably soon): https://github.com/purescript/purescript/releases Spago, the new(ish) package manager, is quite nice: https://github.com/purescript/spago The VSCode integration is solid. I'd say the tooling story is pretty good, over all. Work is underway to provide a package registry, since bower is being phased out: https://github.com/purescript/regist

Yes! The build tool to use is Spago (https://github.com/purescript/spago). It uses package sets which ensures all the packages you use are compatible with eachother. It is incredibly simple to use. spago init spago install halogen spago build Halogen is now at v5 which has removed a lot of the complexity and type wierdness that was around in v4. Highly recommend giving it another spin! Can't speak for how well it works on Windows though. Perhaps someone elso out there knows?

You don't have to use Bower. I've been writing PureScript for a good while now, and I've never used Bower directly. https://github.com/spacchetti/spago

I think Bower was just a "good enough" solution when Purescript was initially implemented. Afaik, people are moving away from it in favor of spago [0] or psc-package [1]. JS' semantics are pretty much opaque when staying in Purescript. Of course all bets are off when using the FFI, but then again the same goes for GHCJS. One major thing in favor of GHCJS is the ability to share code between backend and frontend, but that's not a concern when e.g. the backend is written in another language anyway. EDIT: Also, Purescript on the backend (targeting node or native code) is slowly becoming a thing as well, as this is what this submission is about :) [0] https://github.com/spacchetti/spago [1] https://github.com/purescript/psc-package

Yep, we use the Haskell implementation as a library in Spago [0] and automatically migrating the configuration from old versions is a breeze as we can just manipulate the AST by pattern matching on it, e.g. see [1] The above is quite standard in JSON/YAML too though, but an awesome thing you can do in Dhall is that - since you have functions - you can write migrations for Dhall data in Dhall itself, e.g. see [2] [0]: https://github.com/spacchetti/spago [1]: https://github.com/spacchetti/spago/blob/a77b869edcfddd592f4... [2]: http://www.haskellforall.com/2017/11/semantic-integrity-chec...

It isn't necessarily though. A lot of people are using Spago (https://github.com/spacchetti/spago). Bower is fine though for how they're using it. Often times it'd kill for the ability to relink libraries locally like bower lets you do in Elm while working through a PR of an external library for my use-case.

Agreed. Documentation is hard in all languages though, and it usually gets fixed slowly over time as langs mature. If you had dependency problems you were likely using bower (where dependencies are "resolved", and this leads to broken states in some cases). You might want to try a "package set" approach instead - i.e. there's a curated set of library versions that are known to work together, so "dependency problems" become impossible for users: https://github.com/spacchetti/spago